[libical] would be nice to have a platform-independent way of building libical

[Allen Winter]

On Saturday 04 September 2010 6:34:19 am Andrew Marlow wrote:
> I am a Unix guy and am quite used to saying ./configure && make && make
> install. However, I am currently developing on Windoze so I am beginning to
> appreciate platform-independent ways of building libraries. The configure
> dance is fine for POSIX-like environments but only works on Windoze when
> using cygwin.
> 
> The env I am in right now is for Visual Studio. Any third party C++
> libraries have to be built from source, due to lack of a std ABI for C++ and
> the various compile-time switches we use (e.g checked iterators, unicode
> support etc etc). So I really need to be able to build libical for Windoze
> using Visual Studio 2005. I don't think a pre-compiled binary will quite cut
> it, although I would try it if one was available.
> 
> I have seen several ways to tackle the cross-platform build problem. They
> include:
> 
> MPC (MakeProjectCreator) - This is my personal favourite since it creates VS
> project files (and Makefiles for POSIX of course).
> CMake - I've not used it yet but I've heard lots of good things about it.
> perforce jam - not as good as MPC IMO but still good.
> boost jam - too complex for me...
> 
> Would it be possible for libical to start to use one of these in the
> interests of cross-platform building?

A CMake buildsystem already exists.

Granted, we should add documentation on how to use it.
but Windows people are using it already to build libical for their platforms.